Naselli, Andrew David. Let Go and Let God? A Survey and Analysis of Keswick Theology. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, forthcoming. 459 pages.

Andrew Naselli has an educational background shared by few theologians. He earned his BA at Baptist College of Ministry (2002), his MA and first PhD at Bob Jones University (2003, 2006), and a second PhD at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where he was an assistant to prominent Reformed theologian D. A. Carson.

Let Go and Let God? is a rewrite of Naselli’s dissertation published by the popular Bible study software company Logos. As such, it is targeted at an audience composed mostly of seminarians, pastors, and Bible scholars. And although the first section of the book is a survey of the history of the Keswick Movement, the meat of the book is dedicated to critiquing Keswick theology from a Reformed theological perspective. In short, it is a polemic.

It may seem strange for Religion in America to feature Let Go and Let God?. We normally choose works of history, not theology. That being so, this review will focus on the historical rather than the polemical aspects of Let Go and Let God?; it is not our job as historians to make value judgments on the relative merits of the Reformed and Keswickian views of sanctification.

After Naselli’s introduction, he begins with a 94 page survey of the history of the Keswick movement. Naselli’s task is complicated by the nature of the movement as a loosely formed network of hymnwriters, evangelists, and lay authors. The name Keswick comes from the town of Keswick in the Lake District of northern England where the Keswick Convention Trust has held annual conferences from 1875 to the present. Many, though not all, adherents of Keswick theology attended these conferences.

During the meetings, conference attendees sought to consecrate themselves to God. Although they had accepted Christ as their Savior in the past, they still needed to have an additional consecration where they fully yielded themselves to God. Salvation and consecration were separate, non-contiguous events. A newly converted believer who had yet to yield his will to God was labeled a “carnal Christian” for whom sanctification had not yet begun. His life would be characterized by sinful struggles, spiritual defeat, and a lack of Spirit-given power for service. But by “letting go and letting God” that carnal Christian could begin the process of sanctification, gain victory over sin in his life, and receive Spirit-empowerment for ministry.

At the annual conference, prominent pastors, missionaries, and lay leaders would share testimonies about their personal consecration experiences. Indeed, the list of people connected to Keswick theology reads like a Who’s Who of nineteenth century evangelicalism: F.B. Meyer, Charles Armstrong Fox, Andrew Murray, Hudson Taylor, Frances Havergal, and A.T. Pierson. These men and women were representative of Keswick theology at its height. But Naselli traces the origins of Keswick theology back much earlier, through the Higher Life Movement, Oberlin Perfectionism, the Holiness Movement, and Wesleyan Perfectionism. He also describes the influence of Keswick theology in the twentieth century, on institutions like Moody Bible Institute and Dallas Theological Seminary, in the rise of Pentecostalism, and on later evangelicals like R. A. Torrey, C. I. Scofield, Lewis Sperry Chafer, John Walvoord, and Charles Ryrie.

Prior to reading Let Go and Let God? I would have been unable to define Keswick theology, let alone explain the wide-reaching Keswickian influence on evangelical theology. Assuming that other religious historians share my weakness, scholars of recent American religious history should be interested in reading Naselli’s work. Further adding to the value of Let Go and Let God? as a reference work, Naselli has included a thorough, 127-page bibliography on all things Keswick, making it a good starting point for both seminarians and historians who are interested in the Keswick movement.

Grigg, John A. The Lives of David Brainerd: The Making of an American Evangelical Icon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 276 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-537237-3.

As John Grigg observes, David Brainerd is second only to Jonathan Edwards in evangelicals’ memory of the Great Awakening. His often-republished diary has been a staple of evangelical devotional literature since Edwards published his Life of Brainerd in 1749. Academic historians take note of Brainerd too, both for his role in the controversies surrounding the Awakening and for his missionary efforts among the Delaware Indians. Grigg’s The Lives of David Brainerd is a history of both Brainerds. The book’s first section contains a careful reconstruction of Brainerd’s life, while the second section examines the memory of Brainerd since his death.

To write his life of Brainerd, Grigg has recovered fragments and leaves of Brainerd’s writings, very little of which is extant. He fills in the details with accounts of Brainerd’s hometown, of Yale, and of other missionary efforts to the Indians. Grigg’s argument is that Brainerd stood uneasily on the boundary between the radical and the moderate supporters of the Great Awakening. Brainerd’s expulsion from Yale was not precipitated solely by his intemperate outbursts against Yale leaders, but was a consequence of Brainerd’s attempt to minister to New Haven’s separatist congregation while trying to receive the imprimatur of a Yale degree. Nor was Brainerd forced into a mission to the Indians because he could not get a ministerial position. Rather, Brainerd turned down two offers of a position to continue his mission. Brainerd intentionally based his missions work on a mix of the radical and moderate Awakening. By the time of his death, Brainerd had mostly learned to shed the racist assumptions of his day and to think of people in terms of religion and not race, identifying himself with “godly Indians” rather than “white heathens.”

Grigg’s history of the memory of Brainerd runs from his death to the late twentieth century. He demonstrates that Jonathan Edwards used his Life of Brainerd as an argument in several debates, presenting Brainerd as an opponent of the enthusiastic excesses of the Awakening, as a denouncer of Arminianism, and as a model of life after conversion for his congregants. John Wesley, on the other hand, did his own editing of Brainerd’s journals to provide a model to itinerant Methodists of a minister who was unmarried, ascetic, a proper steward of money, and inured to hardship. Early nineteenth-century evangelicals, notably William Carey in Britain and Adoniram Judson in the United States, also claimed Brainerd, adding a mythical bethrothal between Brainerd and Jerusha Edwards in support of their belief that missionaries should be married. The student missionary movement at the turn of the twentieth century, led by men such as E. M. Bounds and A. J. Gordon, held up Brainerd as a model of prayer. In the second half of the twentieth century, Brainerd inspired missionaries like Jim Eliot, and also stood as a prototype of the campus radical and the civil rights leaders. Grigg thus uses Brainerd’s to reveal significant changes in American evangelicalism and missions.

This book is a revised dissertation, and readers unaccustomed to the genre will be jarred by the historiographical debates, not all of which have been excised from the main text. Because Grigg is obligated by the scarcity of Brainerd’s writings to turn to other sources, the text occasionally wanders from its topic, as in the needlessly long summary of Edwards’s writings. One wishes that the author had not been so generous with people who made up the versions of Brainerd out of whole cloth as to insist that there runs a “thread of truth beneath the surface” (190) of their fabrications.

Quibbles aside, Grigg’s book is precisely the critical study of Brainerd that has been needed by both historians and evangelicals. As such, it is likely to become the standard work on Brainerd.

Moreton, Bethany. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

In To Serve God and Wal-Mart, Bethany Moreton looks at a series of big questions using the world’s biggest corporation as a lens. Her book is a cultural, not a business, history of Wal-Mart. Rather than chart Wal-Mart’s rise through its innovations in technology, logistics, and business practices, Moreton explains how Wal-Mart adopted and modified the culture in which it was founded. This approach permits analysis of a range of subjects, including gender in the workplace, the rise of a service economy, Christianity and free enterprise, business training in colleges and universities, and business promotion of free enterprise in the United States and abroad. This broad inquiry is motivated by two central questions: How did a discount retailer from the Ozarks become the world’s largest corporation, and what motivates the workers employed by Wal-Mart?

The answer to these questions, according to Moreton, lies in the distinctive culture of the Ozarks. Both Wal-Mart’s customers and its employees went from a subsistence-based agrarian economy to a consumer-oriented service economy while skipping a production-oriented industrial economy. Wal-Mart thus incorporated elements of an agrarian economy into its business and labor practices. The retailer had to convince customers who had long valued frugality to become consumers. Wal-Mart reconciled the competing ideas of consumption and thrift by selling consumer goods at the lowest prices in sparsely decorated stores that let the customers serve themselves, in contrast to the ornateness of full-service city department stores. Wal-Mart also overcame the prejudice of its Ozarks constituents, not many generations removed from the Populists, against corporations. It did so by adopting the corporate structure, which the Populists had themselves adopted, while avoiding the taint of “foreign” capital by raising funds from the Walton family then from other Ozark businessmen.

Like its customers, Wal-Mart’s employees carried over patterns from the agrarian economy. They regarded employment as a way to subsistence, rather than a way to wealth. Many employees, especially women, took jobs at Wal-Mart as a means of supporting a family farm, or of supplementing the family income. Women’s labor at Wal-Mart was undertaken as a “second job” in conjunction with their labor as homemakers and childcare providers. The types of jobs that appealed to women were therefore part-time service position, rather than managerial careers. Work at Wal-Mart was thus highly gendered: women worked as clerks, while men worked as managers. Wal-Mart consciously maintained these distinctions by requiring that managers frequently relocate, and it took advantage of the general undervaluing of women’s labor in order to pay them subsistence wages.

These labor practices, however, were not resented by employees. Rather, they appealed to workers because they reproduced familiar patterns of labor from families. They also appealed to Christian concepts of “servant leadership.” This idea was that through service to others, one became a leader and fulfilled his or her duty to God. The idea was in the first instance applied to personal and church relationships, but was also explicitly applied by Christians to business. Through service to customers and co-workers became a way of turning work for Wal-Mart into work for God.

Moreton’s cultural reading of Wal-Mart is perceptive and nuanced. Nevertheless, it suffers from several problems of interpretation and evidence. First, separating the business history of Wal-Mart from its cultural history leaves the reader unable to evaluate the relative weight to be assigned to cultural and economic causes. Put bluntly, did Wal-Mart really prosper because of its cultural adaptation, or because its goods were plentiful and its prices cheap? A simple test is the observation that Wal-Mart has spread far beyond its rural, Christian roots in the Ozarks; it cannot have profited solely from the customer base described in this book. It might also be pointed out that Wal-Mart, while in part a service industry, is also a mover of industrial goods, and so does not fit so neatly in the category to which Moreton assigns it. Then too, Moreton has a powerful explanation for the appeal of Wal-Mart to workers, but one suspects that economic necessity is at least as powerful a motivation.

Second, the book lacks chronological and geographical specificity. This is not to suggest that this topically arranged book ought to have been cast in a narrative, chronological structure. Rather, within each chapter Moreton cites evidence from many years, without explaining how the highly anecdotal evidence is or is not typical. There is little sense of how Wal-Mart developed over time. At the same time, Moreton cites evidence from stores without placing them in their culture outside of the Ozarks. The effect of this lack of specificity is that the book often casts Wal-Mart as the actor, rather than making it plain who the human actors were behind the corporation.

Third, it is not always plain what the connection is between Wal-Mart and the other institutions whose histories Moreton sketches. These institutions are intended to provide an illuminate the culture around Wal-Mart. A case in point is the sketch of the Fellowship Bible Church in Arkansas. The corporatist, entertainment-centered ministries of the church supposedly demonstrate the connection between Wal-Mart and evangelicalism. But the connection is so loosely drawn (some Wal-Mart executives have attended the church) that any other mega-church might have been substituted. For example, Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago and Saddleback Church in California (pastored by Rick Warren, whose Purpose-Driven Life is sold in Wal-Marts) have much in common with Fellowship Bible Church, yet are in no way typical of the Ozarks. Other than the concept of servant leadership, the connections between Wal-Mart and evangelicalism are not well drawn.

Any book dealing with the combination of conservative Southerners, Wal-Mart shoppers, and evangelical Christians is ripe for scholarly disdain. Moreton has successfully avoided that potential pitfall, instead analyzing her subjects with insight and sympathy. Still, by knitting the three groups together so loosely, Moreton may have unintentionally perpetuated these stereotypical connections without adequate evidence.

Alfred O. Hero, American Religious Groups View Foreign Policy: Trends in Rank-and-File Opinion, 1937-1969 Durham, NC: Duke University, 1973. 552 pages. ISBN: 0822302535

Well before religion became de rigueur in Cold War historiography during the 1990s, Alfred Hero published American Religious Groups View Foreign Policy: Trends in Rank-and-File Opinion, 1937-1969, an extensive compilation of survey data on the opinions of American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Hero, a director of the World Peace Foundation, earned his PhD in political science at George Washington University. Unsurprisingly then, American Religious Groups View Foreign Policy is more a work of political science than history. 236 of the 552 pages are dedicated to tables summarizing Gallup polls, surveys, and other “empirical social science data.”¹

Hero set out three questions for his compendium: How closely did the views of religious leaders reflect those of the laity, how did the opinions of the religious grassroots affect foreign policy, and how could religious leaders more effectively communicate foreign policy considerations to their flocks. Hero found that the Catholics surveyed tended to be more isolationist and less well informed then their Protestant counterparts, though Christians in general lagged behind Jews in both categories. Hero tracks the change over time in the beliefs of different groups, e.g., “Negro-Protestants” were more isolationist than white protestants prior to World War II but became significantly more interventionist by the 1960s. He was surprised to find that there was no correlation between the frequency of attending religious services and variance in political beliefs. Furthermore, a parishioner’s theology seemed far more likely to indicate their foreign policy beliefs than their denominational loyalty. Thus Methodists were pretty evenly split over the question of whether to support Chiang Kai-Shek or Mao Tse-Tung, but theological conservatives of any denomination were significantly more likely to support the generalissimo while theological liberals backed Mao. In general, theologically conservative church people were also conservative (which he defines as isolationist) in their approach to American foreign policy.²

But Hero was most concerned about the disconnect between the clergy and laity in the mainline Protestant denominations. Parishioners in theologically conservative denominations tended to advocate the same foreign policy positions as their clergy, but congregates in the theologically liberal mainline denominations advocated very different positions from their leaders. Indeed, the mainline grassroots tended to be nearly as conservative in their foreign policy beliefs as those in fundamentalist churches. Hero’s frustration is evident as he attempts to explain why mainline congregates would not listen to their well-educated, liberal pastors. Hero concludes the book by offering suggestions for how the mainline denominations could more effectively convert their lay members to a more activist foreign policy: encouraging greater ecumenical cooperation, promoting “effective elites,” and emphasizing ethical issues in seminaries.³

Unfortunately, Hero – a member of several committees that advised the National Council of Churches on foreign policy – was blind to the significance of the division between fundamentalist and modernist Christians. He noted that such a difference existed, but only dedicated a few pages to the fundamentalists. American Religious Groups View Foreign Policy was published in 1973, three years prior to Time’s “Year of the Evangelical,” so it would be anachronistic to expect Hero to have placed as great an emphasis on fundamentalists as later historians did. Yet without recognizing its true significance, Hero shed light upon the conservative resurgence of the 1950s-80s. During the 1940s and ’50s, when policy makers looked for input from the religious community they turned to the mainline National Council of Churches. But Congresspeople were surprised to find that most of the constituent mail that they received was “contrary to the policy recommendations of national religious leaders.” This disconnect between conservative laity and liberal clergy in the mainline denominations must have played a role in the lay exodus to fundamentalist denominations, like the Southern Baptist Convention, and new nondenominational mega churches. Conservative lay Protestants in the mainline denominations – misrepresented by their liberal national leadership – voted with their feet.⁴

1 Alfred O. Hero, American Religious Groups View Foreign Policy: Trends in Rank-and-File Opinion, 1937-1969 Durham, NC: Duke University, 1973, vii.

Brodie, Fawn. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. 2nd ed. New York: Knopf, 1971. 499 pages. ISBN: 0394469674.

Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Knopf, 2005. 740 pages. ISBN: 1400042704.

As part of a reading list to teach me about how biographies are written, I recently read two noted biographies about Joseph Smith. The two biographies were Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History (1945) and Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005). Joseph Smith was, of course, a nineteenth century visionary, author or translator of the Book of Mormon, and the founder of the Latter Day Saints. Any historian who handles Smith must deal with the supernatural occurrences and claims that pervaded his life. The question I put to myself as I was reading was this: How should a historian treat supernatural? How should a historian write about alleged visions and miracles and prophecies?

Like many historians of religion, Brodie and Bushman have personal connections to their subject. Fawn Brodie was born into the LDS church as the daughter of a bishop and the niece of an apostle and president. While in graduate school at the University of Chicago, she lost her faith. She then wrote her critical biography of Smith, for which the LDS Church excommunicated her. Richard Bushman, on the other hand, is a professional historian who has retained his Mormon faith. Many of Bushman’s works (one of which won the Bancroft prize) deal with early American history, but his biography of Smith has received perhaps the widest discussion.

Because of their different conclusions on Mormonism, Brodie and Bushman wrote very different biographies of Joseph Smith. These differences might be summed up in the way they treat Smith’s visions. Brodie plainly thinks that Smith was a charlatan and a hoax. She is almost mean-spirited in the way that she goes about debunking Smith and the Book of Mormon. I wished at times that she would simply report what Smith did or said, rather than taxing my patience by repeatedly explaining the obvious. The effect is to make Smith a flat character. In Brodie’s telling, he is always the adolescent trickster with scarcely any room to develop into a man who believed his own message.

Bushman, on the other hand, finds believable most, if not all, of what Smith claimed. Consequently, he writes as if Moroni had actually appeared to Smith, as if he had actually translated the golden plates, and if he had actually received revelations. This is not so problematic; as Bushman points out in his preface, a historian can scarcely be expected to add the words alleged or purportedly before every such statement. More problematic is the way Bushman structures his materials. For example, Bushman reports very little about Smith’s treasure seeking until after he discovers the golden plates. The effect, at least to this reader, was that Bushman presented a Joseph Smith whose mind or inner life was much more believable than Brodie’s, at the expense of leaving what actually happened much less certain.

As for style, both Brodie and Bushman have written good biographies, though neither is the summit of the biographer’s art. Brodie’s is much the better story. Where Bushman’s narrative is often interrupted by tedious justifications of Smith, Brodie’s book is well-crafted with an unswerving narrative. Bushman’s biography, though, is far better at explaining Joseph Smith’s teachings. One can read Brodie’s nearly five hundred pages and learn surprisingly little about what Smith thought or taught. The differences in style between Brodie and Bushman is not simply a result of the commonly invoked dichotomy between narration and explanation. Rather, the difference is due at least in part to the way they treat the supernatural. Brodie is able to dismiss Smith’s experiences as hoaxes and his teaching as nonsense, and so she can get on with her story. Bushman is obligated both to treat them as genuine and to provide scholarly explanations, so he sometimes gets bogged down in justifications.

My sympathies lie with both authors. Like Brodie, I have not a shred of faith in what Joseph Smith taught, and so I find her narrative of Smith’s life more compelling than Bushman’s. But like Bushman, I am a believing historian who writes about the history of religion and faith. As such, I would like to think it is possible to write about religious history, even supernatural occurrences, in a way that is different from unbelievers but that is still rigorously scholarly. Despite their admirable work, I think that neither Brodie nor Bushman has quite succeeded in the way they treat the supernatural.

What, then, is the proper way for a historian to handle visions and dreams and prophecies? The extreme of skepticism assumes there is nothing supernatural. The extreme of credulity treats such occurrences uncritically. My method, which is admittedly ad hoc, strikes what I hope is a balance between those extremes. I frankly distinguish between what I believe is supernatural and what I believe is not, leaving room for what is doubtful. After all, not every spiritual claim is true, and life is too short to give every opinion an equal hearing. But at the same time, I try to treat all religious beliefs as genuinely held, in order to give them their due influence in the lives of those who hold them.

Is there a better way?

Inboden, William. Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 356 pages. ISBN: 978-0-521-51347-0

William Inboden earned his PhD in history at Yale while studying with Jon Butler, Paul Kennedy, and John Demos. He spent his career as a policy advisor for the State Department, for George W. Bush’s National Security Council, and for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He credits John Lewis Gaddis and Harry Stout for guiding him while writing Religion and American Foreign Policy. Stout’s influence is apparent in Inboden’s emphasis on lived religion and religious experience. Inboden also incorporates Gaddis’s focus on personalities, structuring several chapters of Religion and American Foreign Policy around vignettes of Truman, Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and H. Alexander Smith. Inboden wrote Religion and American Foreign Policy to fill a void in Cold War historiography. He believed that the religious aspect of the Cold War had been virtually ignored prior to 9/11 and what has been written since has focused on the Cold War origins of Islamic fundamentalism.

Inboden proposes that America’s war against communism was a religious war between a Christian America and the atheistic Soviet Union. In the introduction, Inboden explores the immediate roots of twentieth century American exceptionalism. Late nineteenth century Americans believed that their country was God’s chosen nation, a City set upon a Hill. Truman and Eisenhower blended that old Puritan idea with Woodrow Wilson’s “belief in America’s international mission.” Thus, fired by a perceived duty to defend humankind’s God-granted freedoms and rights, the United States set out to contain Soviet aggression.

Inboden argues that not only was religious ideology a cause of the Cold War, but also an instrument. He believes that the idea of containment was infused with religious purpose. Religion “strengthen[ed] resolve at home and undermin[ed] communism abroad.” With that end in mind, Truman attempted to build an alliance of all the major Christian churches to resist atheistic communism. This ecumenical goal failed because of deep divisions between mainline and evangelical Protestants, Catholicism, and the Orthodox churches. Instead, Eisenhower constructed a doctrinally-minimalist civil religion that Will Herberg described as “secular Puritanism.” Inboden notes that the religious values shared by policy makers like George Kennan, John Foster Dulles, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower did not create unanimity in policy. But their shared religious discourse did succeed in shaping a worldview hostile to both communism and compromise. Without this religious component, Inboden believes that the Cold War might have taken a very different course.

I believe that Inboden has written a needed corrective to revisionist Cold War historians who see religious rhetoric, if they discuss it at all, as merely cover for policy makers’ true motive: economic imperialism. But Inboden notes that Harry Truman was vocal about the religious nature of the Cold War in both public and private. Indeed, Truman attempted to reach out to the Vatican in spite of tremendous domestic opposition. Inboden provides us with a very different picture of Truman than that of many revisionists who accuse Truman of manipulating Cold War fears to aggrandize presidential power.

Inboden also unintentionally, yet significantly, clashes with Victoria De Grazia’s interpretation of Woodrow Wilson. De Grazia introduces Irresistible Empire with Wilson’s address to the World’s Salesmanship Congress, a speech in which Wilson called for the spread of liberty and justice through consumerism. Inboden instead includes Wilson’s 1905 speech to a religious conference where he declared it America’s mission to “to Christianize the world.” And while President, Wilson addressed the National Council of Churches on multiple occasions arguing that “we have got to save society…by the instrumentalisty of Christianity in this world.” This clash between De Grazia and Inboden is a reminder of how deeply historians emplot their work by choosing what information to make salient and what to leave silent.

I appreciated Inboden’s understanding of how religious modes of thinking pervade American culture. Richard Hofstadter’s concept of a “paranoid style” has become popular again among the chattering classes, but in a less famous passage of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Hoftstadter also noted the “Manichean” tendency of American fundamentalists in the 1950s to see the world in black and white and to define the fight for right in apocalyptic terms. But Hofstadter was too restrained in applying his critique. Even though Truman, Eisenhower, Dulles, and Kennan were not fundamentalists, their religious beliefs encouraged them to cast the conflict between American and the Soviet Union as the ultimate battle between good and evil. Even exceptionalism was inescapeably infused with religious significance; Cold War Americans believed that they were citizens of a God-blessed, Christian nation defending freedom against an evil, atheistic Soviet Union (or as on talk radio today, an Islamic jihad). Inboden has introduced Cold War historiography to the “religious turn” with a sophisticated and well-researched work of religious and diplomatic history.

Watt, David Harrington. Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 165 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-506834-4.

Ethnography is the study of human societies, a favorite tool of cultural anthropologists who seek to understand a community holistically rather than studying the constituent parts of that society. Ethnographers seek to directly experience a community without having to rely on the mediation of written texts. Historians relish archives and typically give short shrift to ethnography. But in Bible-Carrying Christians, David Harrington Watt used ethnography as a historical tool of analysis. Ethnography was a problematic tool for Watt since it required that he attempt to experience evangelicalism as if he were a member of our culture. Watt described his desire to “see things about the world that [he] could not see if [he] had not had them.” He sought a “space between belief and disbelief” so that he can understand our beliefs without embracing them himself. This was no small task for Watt, a self-described socialist, feminist, post-structuralist Quaker. ¹

Watt believed that ethnography could mitigate the problem of selection. When historians go to the archives for research they have to rely upon texts that are mediated by their authors, which are then mediated again by their readers. Furthermore, archival research is dependent upon the materials selected by cultural winners, those with “enough power to get their ideas into print.” Fieldwork and personal experience were Watt’s methods of attempting to avoid mediation and a selective filter. But despite all his precautions, Watt acknowledged the impossibility of a truly “neutral perspective.” Every historian brings suppositions and cultural baggage with them when they approach a topic. Historians often attempt to remove themselves from their writing by adopting a third person language and an neutral tone. We like to think that we are removing bias by avoiding self-reference, but usually all that we accomplish is obfuscation. Rather than being transparent, we instead force our readers to guess at our backgrounds and motives. But by providing a short autobiography, Watt tries to make his worldview apparent to the reader. Throughout his analysis Watt draws from his personal background, teaching the reader as much about himself as about the Bible-Carrying Christians he studied.²

Watt provides a brief background of Philadelphia, the city where all three congregations are located. Watt approached this survey of the city by clipping local newspaper articles for several scrapbooks. He attempted to understand religion in Philadelphia in the manner an ordinary Philadelphian might have, by reading the daily paper and participating weekly in religious services. Watt chose his title Bible-Carrying Christians because although the three congregations might not have identified themselves as evangelicals or conservative Protestants, all three frequently invoked the same formula: “Well the Bible says….” Each congregation has its own chapter, first an independent, fundamentalist Baptist church pastored by a graduate of Bob Jones University, then a progressive Mennonite fellowship, and finally a multi-ethnic branch of the Church of Christ.³

Watt wanted to examine “power relations” within the three churches. Specifically, he looked for instances of asymmetrical power flows, where the power in a relationship is not shared equally. Watt found what he was looking because all three churches had distinct gender roles and shared a common distaste for homosexuality. Even though Watt did not sympathize with Bible-carrying Christians’ opposition to homosexuality and feminism, he avoided the dismissive attitude toward evangelicals often adopted by historians. As Watt noted, left-leaning academics try to avoid “patronizing observations” about “’primitive people’, ‘the natives’, and ‘the orientals,” but he believed that historians are all too ready to apply a double standard when it comes to groups for whom they feel no sympathy. As a post-structuralist, Watt wrote of his distrust of academics “who have been deeply influenced by the European Enlightenment” and only give due diligence to groups or ideas that validate their own “ways of looking at the world.” Watt’s method allowed him to overlook some of his personal presuppositions so that by the end of his fieldwork he no longer viewed Bible-carrying Christians as a dangerous “other.”⁴

Evangelicals should read Bible-Carrying Christians in order to understand how we come across to others. We may not agree with Watt’s conclusions, but his analysis is brutally honest. Bible-Carrying Christians is a quick read (165 pages) and although published by an academic press it is written in an engaging style that is friendly to lay readers.

1. David Harrington Watt, Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), vi, 6; Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 412-453. Of course Watt was unable to completely escape mediated texts since his act of writing a book created another such text. Reading his book meant that I, like every other reader, mediated that text. Mediation is unavoidable.
2. Watt, 6-7, 29-33.
3. Ibid., 5, 11. The title is also a clever riff on the phrase “card-carrying communists.”
4. Ibid., 5, 24, 29, 115. The idea that relationships, especially sexual relationships, are about power can be traced to Michel Foucault.

Murphy, Andrew R. Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 232 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-532128-9.

Most Americans do not know the word jeremiad, but it is a familiar term to scholars of early American religion. To them the term indicates a type of sermon preached in seventeenth-century New England. These sermons lamented that New England had broken the covenant with God made by its founders. If New England continued its decline, God’s judgment loomed, but if New England repented, then it would receive God’s blessing. But even if most Americans do not know the term jeremiad, they are probably familiar with the genre. In sermons or political speeches, they have heard the idea that America is a Christian nation that has disobeyed God and so faces divine judgment. The old genre of the jeremiad is still very much a part of American discourse.

In his recent book, Prodigal Nation, Andrew Murphy has done much to advance our understanding of the American jeremiad. In the first part of the book, he gives the history of three jeremiads: the Puritan Jeremiad in the seventeenth-century, the jeremiads before and during the Civil War, and the jeremiads of the Christian Right from the 1970s to the present. Murphy’s book is the first work (to my knowledge) to study the jeremiad over the entire scope of American history. Murphy has not written the whole history of the jeremiad—he leaves out revolutionary America, the early republic and the War of 1812, most of the jeremiads of the South, and the entire century between the Civil War and the 1960s—but by considering the jeremiad over the long term, Murphy has given us a better understanding of the genre than can be gained from examining it in only one period.

In the second part of the book, Murphy analyzes the American jeremiad with the tools of a political scientist. He cogently argues that there are two American jeremiads, which he terms the traditionalist jeremiad, and the progressive jeremiad. The traditionalist jeremiad, which is typically religious, calls for a return to the literal past through repentance and renewed obedience. This type of rhetoric, which could be stereotyped as a sermon preached from 2 Chronicle 7:14 in November or July, most obviously fits the genre of the jeremiad. But Murphy also identifies a progressive jeremiad. That jeremiad, which is typically secular, calls not for a literal return to the past but for a renewal of America’s past ideals. For example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech called for a return to the ideals of racial equality implicit in the Declaration of Independence, the “text” for his sermon.

Identifying a particular jeremiad as traditional or progressive can be difficult, given the constant realignments of conservatism and liberalism in American political history. But by pointing out that two competing rhetorical traditions share the same genre, and thus some of the same basic assumptions, Murphy has provided a key insight into American politics and religion, both present and historical. Perhaps that insight can contribute to refuting the false assumptions of the jeremiad tradition, and to bridging the increasing gap between conservatives and liberals in political discourse.